Christianity, as I’m always so wont to point out, has innumerous flaws, and at the end of the day, our mystical quest cannot be a constant struggle to follow rules or exist within the framework of what we might call “moralistic” Christianity; moralistic Christianity is the sort that has rules governing everything, oftentimes, silly, irrational rules that can’t possibly be something of the Law of God.

At the end of the day, my experience is with what I must go, and my experience, most recently, has again turned me to the Aeon Sophia, the Holy Wisdom of Christ.

How shall I explain Sophia to you? How can I? I’m not sure. All I know is that whatever this experience I have of Sophia is, the experience seems to be what so many of the New Agers and other such mystics refer to as the Higher Self and the World Soul and so on.

Sophia is the feminine aspect of Christ, His feminine counterpart, “Christ Our Mother.” I think that what our Catholic faith has been trying to express about the Blessed Virgin Mary may indeed rightly apply to Sophia, though Father Troy did say that the early Gnostics saw the Blessed Virgin Mary as a symbol or sign of Sophia.

At the root of it all, though, Sophia appears to be core of our being. How strange it is to discover that “Stevo” is less and less something real and is more and more only some strange, external manifestation of an inner, deeper, and far more real SOPHIA.

Many months ago, I turned to Sophia in prayer one night as I lay myself down to sleep, and I had the most certain experience of unconditional love. Nothing we can ever do, no matter the evil, no matter the sin, can ever cause Sophia to stop loving us. She loves us with all that she is; we cannot be made to be separated from her, no matter how hard we might struggle and try. No crime, no sin, no atrocity is so great that Sophia will not love you.

This assurance of unconditional love is something of a clue to the unraveling and dissolution of our own sinful nature. The promise of unconditional love, the promise of unconditonal acceptance and approval, at least at this moment, virtually dissolves the impulses I would otherwise have to do what we would call “evil.” The basic or instinctual passions dry up in their own way, or perhaps we might say, they are drowned in something far greater than their fire.

I had an impression earlier of a Sophia-themed Eucharist in which the Holy Communion consisted of a kind of cake. Maybe that was simply an explanation that there’s a component of consuming the Divine Feminine in the Holy Eucharist that we and the Church have carelessly overlooked for two millenia. I had the distinct impression that consuming the Body of Sophia is extremely integral and important to the Christian mystic.

It’s bizarre to explain how REAL Sophia is to me. She’s so incredibly REAL to me; it’s not that I don’t appreciate and give due reverence to the Blessed Virgin Mary (I do), but sometimes, I feel like the Blessed Mother’s reverence pales heavily in comparison to that afforded to Sophia.

Maybe, indeed, they have different roles, and those different roles should be respected and preserved and not overlapped. But this would smack, unfortunately, of the attitudes of Protestants who made failed attempt to distill and preserve the “true” teaching of Christ while effectively aborting the only components of the twisted religion we call Christianity.

In fact, perhaps, archetypally, that’s why the Catholic Church is so incredibly and forthrightly OBSESSED with abortion. (I turned on EWTN the other day, and naturally, the talk show was about abortion and the full-on war that was going on with the culture and so on, with the talk show being hosted by two more self-righteous Roman Catholics who defined “Catholicism” as liking the pope, being against gay marriage, and being against abortion.) The Church has, through its own fault, it’s own fault, it’s own grievous fault, often aborted the Eucharistic Christ and the Eucharistic SOPHIA from the Mass, from the theology, and flushed the poor infant down the toilet from the liturgy. Having committed the grave sins that take the Holy Spirit’s favoritism from the parishes, they are left to face, albeit in a largely unconscious way, their own evil that is projected onto the world.

And before any idiot fundamentalist of ANY religion comes at me, I should point out that the above is not a commentary on whether or not abortion is sinful, murder, or a free-for-all adventure in the reproductive rights for women; rather, the entire statement is to say that the Church’s OBSESSION stems from the fact that they’ve outright killed something inside their tradition (or if they haven’t, they’ve tried) that’s incredibly important and parallels the atrocity that they call abortion.

Oftentimes, my friends Kelly and Michael get together with small groups of people to have dialogue and exchange about life and love, to tackle things in a very modern sort of mystical way by “bringing God into the marketplace,” as they say.

Kelly, Michael, and my friend Rheana encouraged me to let Kelly do a Reiki treatment on me. For a while, my schedule conflicted, but finally we were able to do the treatment, and am I glad that I did.

For those of you who are unaware, Reiki is something of an energy massage. The actual explanation is that the energy from the Absolute is diluted into the forms of Gods, Angels, Messengers, what have you, and that the Reiki master further dilutes this energy into a form that the person receiving Reiki can receive.

The only problem is that I felt the old skeptical part of myself rise up several times, wanting to condemn Reiki. But the result of the treatment was rather interesting.

First, I relaxed. I mean, I actually relaxed. That’s rare for me, for sure. The relaxation was so great that I actually made myself slightly sick by moving too quickly when I turned to lie face-down. My body hasn’t been that still in a long, long time.

Second, I had what one might call visions, two of which, in particular, stand out to me and that I will mention here.

The first such “vision” was of a female version of myself. She was naked and looked almost identical to me. She only said one thing to me, in a very kind way: “We are One and the Same.” She felt in many ways like my long-lost sister, and I had the feeling of being her brother and related to her in a brotherly way. It was very peaceful to see her.

The second vision was of being in a Garden and seeing a snake-woman. The woman was naked, her breasts had no nipples, she was green all over, but a pale sort of green, and her snake part began around the hips. Also, her hair was green as well, pulled back in a pony-tail.

We were in a clearing in a lush, verdant forest, and the snake-woman began to play a violin, of all things. The music she played was beautiful and entrancing.

The treatment left me worried to drive, thinking that I might be ungrounded. Luckily several things went wrong at once, so the irritation brought me back down to Earth.

Later, I was reading Carl Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious when I came upon mentioning of a Gnostic book called the Book of Baruch. Lo and behold, he began to talk about a character name Edem, who was, in fact, a snake-woman in the Garden of Eden! I kid you not, this happened a week or so after I had that very sort of vision during my Reiki treatment.

I haven’t especially looked into the meaning of Edem, but I do happen to have a copy of the Book of Baruch in my book called The Gnostic Bible, and I’ll definitely be reading that particular scripture to see what all I can make of it. I’ll blog about all my findings.